Ubuntu 9.04 Accessibility

[Peter Torpey]

I installed the Voxin speech synthesizer.  Although this worked fairly
nicely with the default install of Ubuntu 9.04, there was no way to stop the
Voxin synthesizer from speaking when large amounts of info were displayed to
the screen in a gnome-terminal session.  Apparently there was some strange
interaction between the gnome-speech system and the Voxin synthesizer.
Sometimes it would go on talking for several minutes and would not let the
user type anything into the terminal or switch to another application.

To fix this, I had to remove pulseaudio and configure speech-dispatcher
(which was a bit tricky since I have several audio devices).

Also, even speech-dispatcher wouldn't work with the default setup.  Working
with the people at Oralux (who provide Voxin), they figured out that the
problem could be solved by putting a 15 second delay into the
/etc/speech-dispatcher/speech.conf file so that speech-dispatcher didn't
load immediately upon login.  I don't know why this made a difference, but
it turned out to be the key to getting speech-dispatcher with Voxin to work.

So, although great strides have been made in Linux accessibility over the
years, this certainly isn't a turnkey process yet and there is a way to go.


--Pete

From: Bill Cox <waywardgeek at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: ubuntu 9.04 accessibility
To: Guy Schlosser <guyster at bex.net>
Cc: ubuntu-accessibility at lists.ubuntu.com
Message-ID:
	<499d69a00907060340x61a092a1v9fb7d411d52f4905 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

I also have managed to get a fairly stable version of Ubuntu 9.04 x64,
but I followed a different route.  I didn't have to un-install or stop
using any major package, including pulseaudio, compiz, and Gnome
Speech Services.  I don't need speech-dispatcher.  Basically, I
updated to the bleeding-edge version of several packages, as described
at

    http://live.gnome.org/Orca/UbuntuJaunty#preview

However, I do not recommend blind/VI users follow this bleeding-edge
approach.  Your approach has less risk.  It's nice to see, though,
that better accessibility is coming down the pipe.

Bill